Frances Willard: A Biography

By Ruth Bordin

Frances Willard (1839-98), national president of the WCTU, headed the first mass organization of American women, and through the work of this group, women were able to move into public life by 1900. Willard inspired this process by her skillful leadership, her broad social vision, and her traditional womanly virtues. Although a political maverick, she won the support of the white middle class because she did not appear to challenge society's accepted ideals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781469617497

Ruth Bordin

Ruth Bordin is the author of Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty.

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Frances Willard A Biography

Frances Willard

A Biography

by Ruth Bordin

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill and London

© 1986 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bordin, Ruth Birgitta Anderson, 1917—

    Frances Willard: a biography.

    Bibliography: p.

    Includes index.

    1. Willard, Frances Elizabeth, 1839–1896. 2. Social reformers—United States—Biography. 3. Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. I. Title.

HV5232.W6B67    1986     322.4′4′0924 [B]      86-7029

ISBN 0-8078-1697-3

Chapter XI of this text appeared in somewhat different form as Frances Willard and the Practice of Political Influence in the Hayes Historical Journal: A Journal of the Golden Age 5 (Spring 1985): 18–28.

THIS BOOK WAS DIGITALLY MANUFACTURED.

For Martha and Charlotte

Contents

Preface

CHAPTER I. Perspective

CHAPTER II. Origins

CHAPTER III. Choices

CHAPTER IV. Commitment

CHAPTER V. Career

CHAPTER VI. Interludes

CHAPTER VII. Victory

CHAPTER VIII. Celebrity

CHAPTER IX. Reformer

CHAPTER X. Christian

CHAPTER XI. Politician

CHAPTER XII. Expatriate

CHAPTER XIII. Homecoming

CHAPTER XIV. Passages

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Frances Willard in 1889 at the height of her influence 2

Frances, at age 8 or 9, and her sister Mary Willard 17

Frontispiece and title page of Nineteen Beautiful Years 40

Willard as preceptress of Genesee Wesleyan Seminary 43

Kate Jackson 49

Willard as dean of Woman’s College, Northwestern University 59

Crusade women kneeling in the snow 66

Anna A. Gordon 91

Mary Hill Willard, her daughter Frances, and Anna Gordon 121

Winter at Rest Cottage 122

The den at Rest Cottage 123

The office at Rest Cottage 124

A letter to Alice in 1890 125

Display of state banners at a WCTU national convention in the 1890s 138

One of the hundreds of water fountains built or subsidized by the WCTU at the turn of the century 149

The Temple office building, Chicago 177

Symbolic portrayal of Willard’s mission as she saw it 187

One of the hundreds of appeals used by the temperance movement to save children from alcohol abuse 188

The polyglot petition 193

Lady Henry Somerset in 1890 195

Willard in 1895 in the drawing room of the Cottage, Reigate Manor 227

Armenian refugees from the Constantinople massacre 232

The platform of Willard Hall, Temple office building, decorated for Willard’s funeral 239

Preface

A hundred years have passed since Frances Willard, national president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, reigned as temperance queen of the United States and was revered as the beloved St. Frances of American womanhood. Over forty years have elapsed since the most recent biography of the nineteenth-century heroine and leader was published. Three recent developments underline the need for a new life.

First of all, important original sources—unavailable since early in the twentieth century—were rediscovered after 1980 by Rosalita Leonard, librarian of the Willard Memorial Library in Evanston, Illinois. These include Willard’s diaries, some correspondence, and all but one of the twenty scrapbooks missing when the microfilm edition of the Temperance and Prohibition Papers was made.¹ They are now accessible by purchase or loan as a supplement to the original microfilm edition as well as being available at the Willard Library. Thus, Anna Gordon, Willard’s secretary and companion, always loyal and true in her devotion to Willard, did not destroy, as earlier legend had it, any of her papers but preserved all the memorabilia and private writings of her friend and cohort for posterity to assess.

We now probably have access to all the existing Willard diaries. Although we know of no volumes for many of her adult years, Willard herself explains that there were long gaps in her journal keeping. She did not find time to produce a diary during much of the seventies and eighties, but her autobiography, Glimpses of Fifty Years, shows that a diary for 1874 once existed that covered the period of her resignation from Northwestern University. No such volume is now among her papers. However, forty volumes of journals and diaries are newly available and provide a wealth of firsthand information on the inner workings of Willard as a child and young woman as well as valuable information, hitherto unavailable in any form, on her last decade. These late diaries are supplemented by the recendy available private papers of Willard’s associate and friend, Hannah Whitall Smith.²

Willard’s diaries were last used by Rachel Strachey, British feminist who published a biography of Willard in 1913.³ When Willard wrote her autobiography in 1889 she used the diaries extensively, but the materials from the 1890s were not part of that memoir.⁴ Anna Gordon in her eulogistic tributes published after Willard’s death had full access to the diaries but seems to have used and quoted primarily from Willard’s published works.⁵ Mary Earhart Dillon in her 1944 biography had access to the correspondence file and scrapbooks that have recendy become reavailable but did not see the diaries.⁶ The diaries were found too late for Susan Dye Lee to make use of them in her dissertation, and my recent study of the WCTU was completed before I learned of these materials.⁷

The first five chapters of this volume were in draft before I became aware that access to the manuscript diaries was possible. Thus, I had relied heavily on the excerpts quoted in Willard’s autobiography in attempting to explain the forces and influences in her early life that shaped the mature Willard. The diaries were important in reconstructing this period, permitting a deeper understanding of the continuum that led from girl to woman. On occasion, firm documentation replaced informed speculation. Willard was remarkably open in the use she made of her journals in Glimpses of Fifty Years. It is a tribute to her honesty that no startling reinterpretations flowed from the diaries when they became available in the original. Her editing was relatively minor. She did omit, however, and often the passages she omitted were revealing.

On the other hand, the two diaries for the 1890s break new ground and contribute much to our understanding of Willard’s relationship with Lady Henry Somerset and her movement onto the world stage. More importandy, they contribute significantly to our knowledge of the transatlantic interconnections between the woman movement in the United States and Great Britain in the last years of the nineteenth century.

Newly available sources are only one of the reasons that another study of Willard is appropriate. Mary Earhart wrote her biography when temperance was a discredited cause. She reflected the scholarship of her time, which regarded the temperance movement as an anti-libertarian, last-ditch fight of fundamentalist Protestant rural America to hang on to its eroding power base in an urban society. The tide of scholarship now runs in another direction. Contemporary scholars have explored the problem of alcohol abuse in the nineteenth century and found its presence very real indeed, and lay public opinion is again concerned about drinking as a contemporary threat. As one commentator put it, Not so long ago that problem was scarcely larger than a human hand against the horizon, but now it makes good newspaper copy.⁸ In fact, Time magazine devoted an issue in the spring of 1985 to the new temperance.

Concurrently, the women’s movement of the late 1960s and 1970s and the accompanying growth of women’s studies have inspired an impressive burst of scholarship in women’s history. This has given us large accretions of fresh knowledge as well as stimulated new conceptual frameworks through which we can attempt to understand past generations of women and the roles they played in society. Again, no previous biography of Willard makes use of these new insights.

Inevitably the biographer becomes involved in a touchy interplay of objectivity, self-analysis, and self-indulgence. Biography by its very nature is a subjective medium, and the biographer must sort out personal needs of identification and aspiration from those of the biogra-phee. My life experience quite naturally influenced my attraction to Frances Willard as a subject for research. My training and work as both a historian and an archivist have shaped the way I approached my task. As a manuscript librarian I became familiar with a wide range of nineteenth-century personal papers, an experience I hope has added perspective to my understanding of Frances Willard and nineteenth-century women. As a historian, I trust I have been able to capture some of the larger picture and adequately relate Frances Willard to the society in which she lived. Also, in a personal sense Frances Willard touched many chords in me. Much of her life was close to my early life—her religious commitment, her belief in the equality of women to men, but also her love for the family. The points of communality in our views of the world cannot be denied.

No biography has ever told the whole truth or recreated the person who actually existed. Nonetheless, Anna Gordon, writing soon after Willard’s death, told us much about the way Frances Willard was viewed by her colleagues and contemporaries. Rachel Strachey saw the Willard her grandmother had known when they worked together in the Anglo-American woman movement. Mary Earhart showed us Willard at the end of another era when women’s values were fast changing. Hopefully this volume helps to provide new insights for a later feminist age.

In Woman and Temperance I advanced the thesis that the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union became the first mass organization of American women, and that it was their work in the temperance cause— and its congeniality with the nineteenth century’s doctrine of spheres— that enabled women to move widely into public life by 1900. In my view, Frances Willard’s contribution to this process was twofold. She combined skillful leadership, broad social vision, and keen intelligence with the womanly virtues so dear to the nineteenth-century white middle class, love of home and family and that special quality called womanliness. She also understood and used American women’s unique place in the evangelical Protestant church. Frances Willard was a successful leader because she did not appear to challenge her society’s accepted ideals, especially the tenets of the cult of domesticity, as she simultaneously offered women a range of goals and activities that led them into legislative chambers, union halls, and a host of helping professions.

She also had a peculiar charisma that doubly enhanced her ability to lead. In the words of Hannah Smith, her longtime friend and colleague, writing to Olive Schreiner as they consoled each other on Willard’s death, She was almost pure spirit in very truth—more so than anyone else I ever knew, and I see from thy words how it was that she was so wonderfully uplifting and ennobling in all her influence. She had that indefinable power that spirit always exercises that was entirely independent of the words she said or the things she did, and one was always uplifted in her presence without knowing at all how it happened.⁹

The genesis of this project dates back over ten years to the time when I first began work on the woman’s temperance movement and decided that two books would have to be written. Frances Willard played a much larger role in nineteenth-century America than her leadership of the temperance cause, and women’s part in the temperance movement was much larger than Willard. Each deserved a separate volume. A long project results in many obligations. The people and institutions that made this book possible are beyond acknowledging.

My major debt is to my friends and colleagues at the Bendey Historical Library of the University of Michigan. Francis Blouin, Diane Hatfield, Mary Jo Pugh, and Kenneth Scheffel should be singled out for their special contributions. But credit should also be given to the library itself. Without the microfilm edition of the Temperance and Prohibition Papers, this project would never have occurred to me, much less have been possible.

An equal debt is owed to the staff of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union who made possible the microfilm edition’s WCTU series and the supplement encompassing the Willard diaries. Martha Edgar, national president, has cooperated in every way, as did Rosalita Leonard, librarian of the Willard Memorial Library in Evanston. Their part in arranging the filming of Willard’s diaries and certain related papers that composed the supplement to the microfilm edition will prove a boon to scholars for many years to come. Both understand Willard’s importance to the history of American women, as does their organization.

I also owe an important debt to Barbara Strachey Halpern for generously providing access to the papers of Hannah Whitall Smith.

Evelyn Brooks, Joan Brumberg, Jean Campbell, Allen Davis, Jacqueline Goggins, Marjorie Lansing, Judy Papichristou, Lena Ruegamer, Rosemary VanArsdale, and Martha Vicinus have read all or parts of the manuscript and made helpful suggestions and sometimes substantial contributions.

I have also been assisted by a Beveridge grant from the American Historical Association and by Continuing Education for Women at the University of Michigan, which sent me to the 1983 workshop on the biography and autobiography of women sponsored by Smith College’s Project on Women and Social Change.

A number of other manuscript libraries and individuals have helped my research in various ways and are acknowledged in the notes and bibliography.

Ruth Bordin

Frances Willard A Biography

Frances Willard in 1889 at the height of her influence. (Reprinted from Willard, Glimpses of Fifty Years, and Bordin, Woman and Temperance)

Chapter I: Perspective

On 17 February 1898 in a hotel room in New York City, Frances Willard died quietly in her sleep. When her body was brought to Chicago six days later, crowds of mourning admirers met her casket, and when the coffin was placed on the podium of Willard Hall in the Chicago Loop’s Temple office building, it was escorted by a guard of honor, Illinois women singing the old hymn, Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me. The flags of the nation’s second largest city floated at half mast. Throngs of silent Chicagoans, thirty thousand in one day, filed by the bier for a parting look at their city’s most famous citizen. Crowds stood for hours on the wet, windy pavement outside Willard Hall waiting in fallen snow for their turn to pay homage to this slight, middle-aged woman.

Chicagoans were not the first to honor Willard at her death. Funeral services had already been held at the Broadway Tabernacle in New York City. Seven clergymen officiated. A slow-moving procession, lasting for hours, filed past her casket before the dove gray box was placed in a special railroad carriage for the journey west. The funeral car stopped for a memorial service at Churchville, New York, Willard’s birthplace. And at Buffalo a large delegation of white ribboners [members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union] . . . passed sorrowfully through the car, leaving ‘lilies of love and loyalty.’¹ The flags of Washington, D.C., as well as Chicago were lowered on the day of her funeral.² Final services took place in Willard’s home church, the First Methodist Episcopal Church of Evanston. Hundreds of students from nearby Northwestern University filled the galleries, and the white silk flag that had been carried at the head of the dedicatory procession for the 1893 Columbian Exposition was displayed behind the pulpit. Willard’s coffin rested on a rug of roses and violets and was crowned by a rainbow arch of flowers. Her funeral was a Victorian stage setting worthy of a woman unsurpassed in dramatizing the social movements she supported. Willard had been a superb showwoman. Also, her leadership of reform causes was symbolized in her decision to be cremated, to help forward progressive movements even in my last hours.³

This woman, widely hailed in the nineteenth century as America’s heroine, had never been elected to public office. Most of the ideas for which she fought represented as yet unachieved goals. But the nation mourned her with the grief, admiration, and respect it would have bestowed on a great national hero or a martyred president. No woman before or since was so clearly on the day of her death this country’s most honored woman. Never before had an American woman evoked such an outpouring of reverence and affection.

Willard was as well known to her countrymen in the last decade of the nineteenth century as Eleanor Roosevelt was to be in the 1930s and 1940s. She was a major subject of press attention. Newspaper and magazine interviews with the great lady and those close to her featured vignettes from her life story as well as her opinions on public issues. Willard’s every going and coming was reported in the press. Her picture, clipped from a newspaper, purchased from some reform organization, or awarded as a prize for services rendered to a temperance union, graced many American homes, humble and prosperous alike. The list of names of people who sent letters of condolence on her death totals over a hundred pages.

Some of this adulation was frivolous and trivial. For example, the children of Chicago voted to name two lion cubs at the zoo Frances Willard and Martha Washington. But much of it represented the genuine renown and respect in which she was held. No less an arbiter of nineteenth-century American values than Edward Everett Hale stated that he invariably read two annual messages, that of the president of the United States and Frances Willard’s yearly presidential address to the WCTU.⁴ In the 1880s and 1890s her annual message to temperance women nationally assembled was a widely read and consulted document. Invariably it was an overview of the nation, a summary of the United States’ strengths and weaknesses, and not incidentally an assessment of the current status of American womanhood. Edward J. Wheeler, editor of the Literary Digest, a popular magazine, observed in an editorial obituary that Willard was a woman suffragist, and woman suffrage has not prevailed. She was a Prohibitionist and Prohibition has not prevailed. But beyond and above all these she was an awakener of women to the possibilities of true womanhood and she has probably done more than any other person who ever lived to bring to those of her own sex the world over, an adequate realization of their own powers.⁵ Wheeler’s tribute expressed well the attitude of the liberal political community toward Willard when she died.

But Willard also inspired the sentimental, uncritical adulation of ordinary women. One rhapsodized on her death:

She is coming! Said the angels in heaven,

As they pressed to the crystal gate.

There’s a hush of the golden symbols,

And the stars of the midnight wait.

She is coming! We heard the summons,

And the Seraphim guards are in flight,

Afar as their flashing pinions,

As they move through the deepening night.⁶

Willard seriously was called Saint Frances or our Queen of Temperance by the press and from the pulpit. The New York Independent wrote, No woman’s name is better known in the English speaking world than that of Miss Willard, save that of England’s great queen. . . . it is the simple truth to say that in the death of Miss Willard the foremost woman in the public life of this country has been removed. Another obituary referred to Frances Willard as next to Queen Victoria the most influential woman of the age, and went on to predict that generations to come will honor her more and more.⁷

That prediction was not to be fulfilled. A hundred years have passed since Frances Willard, national president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, reigned as temperance queen of the United States and was revered as the beloved St. Frances of American womanhood. She is a forgotten leader. Although in recent years Willard has received considerable scholarly attention, especially from historians of women,⁸ she is no longer a folk hero. Her distant cousin by marriage, the educator Emma Willard, is more likely to be mentioned in secondary school books. Carrie Nation, the flamboyant Kansas foe of drink, is more often associated in the popular press with the temperance crusade led by Willard for a quarter of a century. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, unlike Willard, are household words today, but in the 1890s Willard’s fame eclipsed that of both of them.

Why did Willard receive such widespread and fervent acclaim in her own time, only to have it prove short-lived? Two episodes from my own experience provide a clue to this dilemma. On my first visit to Washington, D.C., as an adolescent in 1930, I remember taking with my family the usual tour through the Capitol Building, and the uniformed male guide pointing out the marble figure of Frances Willard in Statuary Hall. In his set spiel, he stressed how Willard was the only woman so honored by her state. I stood by and felt a strong surge of pride in my sex, that one of us had made it to that illustrious company. Prohibition was still in force. Willard was still taken seriously as a reformer and national heroine, although her preeminence had begun to slip. However, I also remember another occasion over twenty years later—in the 1950s—when I accompanied my own children on the same tour. This time the guide facetiously remarked that Illinois, the home of Lincoln, had chosen a teetotalling woman, the president of the WCTU, as its representative in Statuary Hall.

Between these two visits to the Capitol Building and Statuary Hall, prohibition, the crown jewel of many a nineteenth-century reform program, had been repealed as well as associated with crime, lawbreaking, and gunfire in the streets rather than with the perfection of society. Hopes for prohibition had been high. Its failure was seen as so ignominious that public disillusionment could be handled only by translating the idealism of the temperance cause into a national joke, the epitome of midwestern pious provincialism. When Willard’s statue was placed in the Capitol in 1905, Senator Albert Beveridge, speaking at the dedication ceremony, described Willard as the first woman of the nineteenth century, the most beloved character of her time.⁹ Fifty years later she was an anomaly among the great and distinguished because the cause with which she was most closely associated had been overwhelrningly rejected. She had been removed from America’s panoply of heroes.

Prohibition, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, was in part the direct result of Willard’s labors. Prohibition also caused her eclipse. Willard’s beliefs and contributions, which spanned a wide variety of reform causes, were reduced after her death to a single dimension, temperance, and that dimension of her life’s work was repudiated unequivocally by a later generation. The causes to which she made lasting contributions—for example, the vote for women, the public kindergarten, separate correctional institutions for women, Protestant ecumenicism—became part of the permanent fabric of American life. But these causes were later dissociated from Willard because for much of her public career, and almost always in her public utterances, she saw temperance as the seedbed where other reforms would be nourished.

In this ordering of her priorities, Willard reflected prevailing values. For example, Richard Ely, the respected Wisconsin economist and reformer, saw the deep, wide movement of social reform as centered in temperance, and from that center spreading out in ever more inclusive circles until it touches the entire life of society.¹⁰ Terence Powderly, the nineteenth-century labor leader, told his followers in the Knights of Labor, Workingmen, shun strong drink as you would a scorpion. ... I draw no line between drinkers. They are all in danger.¹¹ Sidney Webb, the British Fabian socialist, wrote to Beatrice Potter in 1892, when they were courting, "what I see in the Deptford slums does make me feel that drink is one great enemy."¹²

Drink was one great enemy. Americans had wrestled with the personal and social dislocation produced by their society’s tendency toward excessive use of alcohol for over half a century when Willard adopted it as her cause. Temperance advocates, using prohibition laws passed by state legislatures, had succeeded in reducing American dependence on drink in the 1850s, only to watch consumption figures rise again with the Civil War. But all through the nineteenth century Americans were heavy users of alcohol, heavier users than they have ever been since. Reformers zealously attempted to find remedies for what they saw as an alarming characteristic of a republic where the people, drunk or sober, presumably occupied the seat of power. Although the advocates of the drink reform also concerned themselves deeply with the personal and family misery caused by alcohol abuse, the threat to the republic’s great experiment with self-government was a major motivating force. As industrialization accelerated toward the end of the century, safety factors also came to the fore. Could machinery be entrusted to tipsy operators or railroads left in any but sober hands?

Commitment to the cause of temperance among political liberals was widespread even into the twentieth century. New York State cider, not champagne, was served at Alice Roosevelt’s White House debut in 1902. No reform president could have encouraged or condoned the use of intoxicants by young people during the Progressive Era. Some twenty years later, bathtub gin was being made in the basement of Alice Roosevelt’s home in Washington while her husband, Nicholas Long-worth, was serving as speaker of the House of Representatives and the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act were the law of the land.¹³ So quickly did American mores change. But in the 1890s prohibition (or at least the drastic regulation of the liquor trade) was the articulated goal of most of the membership of the Protestant churches, the business community, and the upwardly mobile middle class. Temperance also had strong support in many Catholic circles, especially among the Irish. In 1890 the WCTU alone had nearly 150,000 dues-paying members; it was the first mass organization of women in the United States and probably the world. As a temperance leader, Willard epitomized prevailing establishment values.

Until recendy historians of women have not appreciated fully the strong pull of the temperance cause in reform circles. Although Mari Jo Buhle recognized Willard’s tactical genius in moving women step by step into a broad reform program via temperance, as well as the importance of the temperance movement in recruiting and training women activists, she regarded the WCTU’s goal offending the liquor traffic as unusually anticlimactic" compared with the breadth of the Union’s other aims.¹⁴ Mary Earhart, in her biography of Willard written in the 1940s, was almost embarrassed by Willard’s devotion to temperance, a cause that seemed too trivial to be worthy of the talent, energy, and commitment of this remarkable leader.¹⁵ As recendy as 1979, a study of Julia Ward Howe excused her devotion to the temperance movement as Howe adopting the tenets of her father’s creed.¹⁶ He was a temperance man, as if this were somehow an unworthy plank in Howe’s political credo. Actually Howe embraced temperance as essential to reform and would have done so regardless of her father’s beliefs. Temperance was seen as crucial to social change by most nineteenth-century reformers. Howe, Mary Livermore, Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, and other candidates for revered woman status in the late nineteenth century all actively supported the temperance movement, although temperance was for each of them a secondary commitment with which they were less readily identified. Each was widely admired and respected in her own time, but did not attract Willard’s level of fame or adoration. Willard, as the undisputed queen of temperance, was the undisputed queen of American womanhood.

Willard’s fame among her contemporaries rested partly on her being a temperance stalwart in a felicitous time, but her attitudes about women also reflected the values of her era and contributed in no small measure to her stature among her contemporaries. The United States was a society that cherished the idea of women’s special sphere of responsibility, the home and the nurture of children.¹⁷ Frances Willard enthusiastically shared this belief in the tenets of the cult of domesticity. She extolled its celebration of women’s special virtues, and she added her own corollary, a corollary shared by increasing numbers of women as the century moved into its final decades, that women must use their special virtues to uplift the public sphere and imbue politics and citizenship with the righteousness and purity so peculiarly their own. Students of women’s history are in general agreement that the doctrine of spheres took women by inexorable steps into the public arena. The first step was of course to emphasize women’s role in the church, where they had always been.¹⁸ If women were the cornerstone that upheld moral character in the home and a major vehicle for supporting the work of the church (the church by its very nature being a quasi-public institution), the rationale for extending women’s sphere to other public activities was already there, and in one way or another the spheres doctrine was so used throughout the nineteenth century.¹⁹

However, Frances Willard greatly accelerated and popularized the process.²⁰ If woman was the embodiment of moral superiority and the acknowledged repository for the true, the good, and the beautiful, Frances Willard more than any other woman became in the popular mind by 1890 the apotheosis of that ideal. Her obituaries confirm this. The Brooklyn Eagle wrote that her mental faculties were not cultivated at the expense of the gender side of her nature; a Canadian newspaper stated that She was above all a good woman; other obituaries mentioned her womanly feelings, her lofty exemplification of womanly virtue.²¹ Willard’s canonization as St. Frances was the result of her careful manipulation of the doctrine of true womanhood as well as her association with temperance. Had she been less willing to embrace eagerly the accepted values of the day, her fame in her own lifetime would hardly have surpassed that of Anthony, Stanton, or Howe. Part of the reason for her almost universal acceptance by men and women alike was that Willard herself, despite her devotion to public service, always preached ‘Womanliness first—afterwards what you will.²² This was a key verse in the gospel according to Saint Frances. A generation later Charlotte Perkins Oilman saw things differently. To her the priorities went, the world’s life first—my own life next. Work first—love next."²³

Historians of women have been quicker to grasp the importance of Willard’s use of the doctrine of spheres to move women into public life than they have been to understand the centrality of temperance. Ellen DuBois early attributed the WCTU’s popular success to the fact that women felt comfortable with activism and protest only if it was based in the private sphere, if it took as its starting point women’s position within the home.²⁴ Barbara Epstein believed that Willard’s use of woman’s sphere was important, but she also believed (somewhat ambivalendy) that Willard’s dual support of conventional morality and women’s equality was inconsistent because eventually female equality would require restructuring the family, and Willard’s home protection doctrine implied defense of the male-dominated family structure.²⁵ Mari Jo Buhle recognized the importance of sphere ideology to women’s activism, pointing out that even socialist women clung to the home as the traditional source of women’s power.²⁶

Perhaps the affinity women historians felt for the importance of the sphere doctrine in moving women into public life reflects a phenomenon they observed in conservative women of their own time. It is possible to argue that, in her emphasis on the womanly approach to public activity, Willard was an antecedent of Phyllis Schlafly, and that the WCTU, with its emphasis on a closely delineated moral code and the glorification of womanhood, was the ancestor of Schlafly’s following.²⁷ But was Frances Willard a conservative? Or was her emphasis on womanliness a way to clothe new answers in old garments? Willard differed from Schlafly in that she kept women pushing for equal rights rather than retreating into domesticity by forging a major link, temperance, between devotion to the home and public work by women. She resembled Schlafly in that she repeatedly emphasized that women’s home role was important. Also like Schlafly she made public life her own sphere and urged other women to join her in her organizing efforts while at the same time she celebrated domesticity.

Willard’s devotion to home and womanliness was paired with radical social ideas. Like many of the women in her movement, she was on the cutting edge of reform. Edward J. Wheeler did not call her a Christian Socialist without good cause, nor was her cremation an odd note in a medley of nostalgia for the good old days. Willard used conservative values to promote radical ends.

Nevertheless, the respect for conservative values was there. Willard did not phrase her demand for the expansion of women’s public role in terms of equal rights until late in her life when her own movement pushed her in that direction, and when activist women generally were more ready to embrace that position. By 1894 the WCTU clearly advocated the women’s ballot, and the impetus had come first from the state unions.²⁸ But the home protection ballot, as Willard popularized it in the 1870s and 1880s, was hardly a call for women to exercise their inalienable right to vote as citizens of the republic. Instead, she asked that the mothers and daughters of America have a voice in the decision by which the door of the rum shop is opened or shut beside their homes.²⁹ When Willard championed the ordination of women and their equal participation with men in church governance, she spoke of the refinement, sympathy, and sweetness of the womanly nature that fits women especially for the sacred duties of the pastoral office.³⁰ The clothes she wore at her public appearances were always modesdy appropriate, but she was quite amenable to a becoming touch of lace at the neck or a subdy flattering color. Men as well as women noticed and responded to these concessions to femininity. She eschewed strident language. One of her speeches was described as almost a poem.³¹ Her addresses extolled the home and women’s work in it.

Willard co-opted the domestic sphere and skillfully manipulated it to serve her broader ends. But her vision, unlike Schlafly’s, was not conservative. She had no interest in maintaining the status quo or turning back the clock to some simpler time. Instead she was, if anything, overoptimistic in her zeal to find innovative solutions to age-old problems. It was this meld of womanliness, Christian Socialism, equal rights, and concern for nurturance that made the Willard ethos tick. Here lay the key to her political success, her ability to make public work by women acceptable, even desirable, to large numbers of men and women. Temperance like church work was considered a proper womanly arena, one in which women’s role had always been accepted. By tying suffrage, women’s rights, prison reform, and a dozen other causes to temperance Willard made it possible for large numbers of women to move easily into the public sphere by 1890.

The career of Frances Willard illustrates the nineteenth-century woman’s dependence on family. Nineteenth-century